Date: 15/02/2011

AirWalk, Mindspeed and Lime develop picocell LTE

AirWalk Communications Inc, Mindspeed Technologies, and Lime Microsystems have together developed an LTE small cell product, which are called picocells and femtocells.

Small cells are a crucial element for LTE networks. Due to the unique wideband nature of LTE, throughput decline often occurs at macrocell edges, and picocells and metrocells are the ideal solution for providing full coverage and capacity. In addition, heavy data traffic hot spots tend to unbalance the macrocell coverage, and small cells provide an effective means for data offload. To support the exponential growth of in-building data usage, residential femtocells and enterprise femtocells are being deployed to extend the network inside buildings that are RF challenged.

In this joint effort AirWalk's small cell knowledge, Mindspeed's Transcede system-on-chip processors and Lime Microsystems' wideband multi-standard transceiver technology are combined to develop cost effective CDMA, WCDMA and LTE (TDD and FDD) small cell base stations.

"The market demand for LTE is growing exponentially due to the popularity of mobile video and data applications, making LTE small cell solutions essential to provide data off-load and coverage improvements as operators migrate from 3G towards LTE," said Chris Osborn, CTO at AirWalk Communications. "Working closely with the teams at Mindspeed and Lime has enabled us to introduce the most advanced LTE small cell solution available."

"We are very pleased that Airwalk has selected the Transcede Baseband Processor to power their next generation LTE base stations," said Alan Taylor, marketing director for baseband processing solutions at Mindspeed. "Airwalk is a leading supplier of picocell, enterprise and residential femtocells to service providers and are a great example of how Transcede can be leveraged to create optimal small cell solutions very quickly".

"We are very happy to be building on our success with Airwalk's best in class CDMA product by delivering our transceiver technology for their new LTE platform," said Philippe Roux, VP business development at Lime Microsystems. "Airwalk is leading the way in providing innovative solutions to the market utilizing our multi-standard transceiver IC, LMS6002DFN. Our chip supports all frequencies from 400MHz to 4GHz and data bandwidths up to 28MHz."

The LTE small cell technology is planned to be extended into a complete portfolio of products over the next few years. The introductory product supports the 700MHz band, utilizes 500mW power output, accommodates up to 200 simultaneous users, and supports S1 packet core network interface.